The impact of supramolecular chemistry in medicine: Removing the border between infectious and non-infectious diseases

The concept, molecular self-assembly, has a profoundly novel effect on thoughts and efforts related to medicine and pharmacology. This new style of thinking calls for a range of new researches based on new predictions about disease mechanisms (especially autoimmune diseases, endocrinopathies, and neoplasms) and relevant treatment strategies (superstructural pharmaceuticals). Thanks to this new point of view the most fundamental issue in physiology is the quest of how biological systems exert control on the self-assembly of their components and the most fundamental issue in pathology is the quest of how self-assembly of an undesired superstructure triggers a network of events that result in a particular disease state. Therefore, every disease (infectious or non-infectious) must have a superstructural disease agent (SDA). Sophisticated superstructures like bacteria and viruses are stable and long living and thus infectious but simpler SDAs are unstable and short living thus less infectious. Then we can see how diseases like sarcoidosis, currently classified as noninfectious, are indeed infectious. From this point of view, the fact that one viral infection is protective against a second viral infection can be seen as a superstructural drug that protects against a superstructural disease agent. So it becomes understandable how one opportunistic infection in a late-stage HIV-infected individual may cause deestablishment of HIV-infection in a long-term survivor. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.